MusashiAI ,the Israeli-Japanese ‘Industry 4.0’ joint venture, announces the spin-out of 634AI, a company focused on developing MAESTRO – world’s first fully integrated RTLS-driven central control tower for streamlining management of any mobile task on an industrial floor.
The spin-out allows 634AI to focus exclusively on bringing to market MAESTRO, which uses Computer Vision and AI to control and monitor a broad spectrum of movements on an industrial floor through its state-of-the-art spatial mapping and movement orchestration.
Anything from tracking movements of goods, real time safety alerts for forklifts and driven pallet jacks, to navigating and managing fleets of AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) and AMRs (Autonomous Mobile Robots), all through a unified and flexible modular system and at a fraction of the price of today’s solutions.
MAESTRO will make comprehensive industrial floor management possible and affordable, allowing large-scale and small-scale businesses to dramatically increase the efficiency and productivity of their indoor operations.
Onn Fenig, CEO of 634AI, said: “What has been happening in the AMR and the industrial floor automation industry over the last few years has been like spending millions on developing zero-gravity pens, when all we’ve needed has actually just been a pencil.
Our motivation for creating MAESTRO was to give businesses a practical and affordable tool that will enable them to enjoy safer and smarter indoor mobility. We’re on a mission to make any indoor task autonomous and affordable.”
The majority of AMRs on the market today are hardware- heavy, often require complex setup and maintenance, and are outside of most companies’ price ranges. Each AMR platform operates as a completely stand-alone robot and a maze of different software is required to operate, navigate and manage a variety of different AMRs.
Today, even with the gradual adoption of the VDA5050 protocol for AMR interoperability, coordinating different AMRs of different functionalities and from different domains is not straightforward. In addition, many AMR designs also fail at a drawing board level to develop a capacity for workplace synergy with human counterparts.
One central controller for a whole facility or operation all but eliminates the threshold for the adoption of AMRs by large, medium, and even small businesses.
Onn Fenig explains the simplicity of 634AI’s solution: “A simple kit can turn even a mechanical pallet jack into a fully autonomous vehicle that can connect to MAESTRO. MAESTRO plots routes for AMRs, spots and classifies hazards and obstacles, anticipates potential collisions ahead of time, and orchestrates the safe and efficient completion of different tasks – for robots, people and traditional, non-robotic vehicles.
“Most AMRs today suffer from tunnel vision, with their eyes and ears embedded within the robot itself. This limited point of view provides a safety risk, so to mitigate against it, they have to move very slowly and require an army of engineers and technicians to keep them on track – which in turn lowers productivity and makes them even more expensive and not really autonomous.”
“Industry 4.0 isn’t some futuristic vision of a far-fetched world – it’s happening today. 634AI and MAESTRO have simplified and democratized indoor mobility and the adoption of AMR platforms, delivering the sizable benefits available of Industry 4.0.”
